Dedicated to getting to the truth of things. A Christian since 1984. (Just a Christian, without pigeon-holing into a denomination.) I like people to be free to ask their questions about Christianity and the church. I like to approach faith questions with my brain switched on. A qualified classicist and historian.
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And I don't look like James Garner. Enough about me already.

Sunday, 14 June 2015

Did Jesus Exist? 5. Did Paul invent Jesus?

This is one of the easier things to deal with. Paul didn’t
invent Jesus. Remember that back in the 30s of the first century, he had been
harming people whose religious life had to do with Jesus – so Paul was lagging
behind them in having any knowledge of Jesus. He writes about those who 'were apostles before I was' (Gal 1:17) and names some that he met - especially Peter.

What about what mythicists say?

A curious argument has surfaced that Paul’s visions and
revelations account for everything he knew about Jesus, such as where Paul
seems to say that it was the Lord who told him that he was betrayed. In other
words, nothing Paul says about Jesus has anything to do with reality, so the
argument goes.

Paul gives the game away

Actually, Paul never claimed that he got all his
information about Jesus from visions – and he
gives the game away by mentioning his victims were Judean churches and that later he spent fifteen days with Peter too! It is avoiding reality to claim that he learned nothing from these encounters. What his victims believed tells us more.

In that
time, Paul would have had to convince Peter than he was no longer going to
persecute the church, that he was sorry for having done so, and that his change
of heart was for real, due to changing sides so that he now shared Peter’s faith.
This former persecutor would have had to give Peter a really good reason why he
had taken the time and trouble to come to Jerusalem to get to know Peter, with
Peter being a key member of the persecuted church community whose life had
something to do with Jesus. (All of this can be gathered from the direct and
indirect evidence of Galatians 1.) Doing so to Peter’s satisfaction, and making
acquaintance with each other, means they have to have shared their stories with
each other to a greater or lesser degree. That’s how people get to know each
other.

Therefore, if Paul’s letters were really claiming that Paul only ever
learned about Jesus through his own visions, then you wouldn’t expect him to
concede the point that he spent so much time with Peter!

Rather more revealing
are Paul’s confessions about having prior contact with believers in Jesus (when
he was persecuting them, when he was with Peter, etc.).

Even if Paul got his
‘gospel’ message direct from Jesus in a revelation, he didn’t get all his information
about the beliefs of the churches in Judea that way. He was harming the
churches first – he got his gospel message later.

Come to that, when Paul was in Jerusalem with his friends
Barnabas and Titus in the 40s, meeting apostles, would we really suppose that
Barnabas and Titus would have learned nothing from the churches in that time? Wouldn’t
Paul have noticed what they were talking about?

In summary, if Paul really wanted anyone to think that he
got every bit of his information from his own visions, then he ends up giving a
very different impression! Paul didn’t live in a bubble, insulated from
what other people knew. He had more than one source of information, and 'revelation'
was no more than one of them.

A case to answerWhere does this leave us? It means that there is a case to
answer. That is, the belief that Jesus existed can’t be tossed aside out of
hand. There is a lot for sceptics to consider, given that there was such a lively belief in the 30s that Jesus had lived and died as a Jew in Judea.

We’ve got here without even looking at the gospels. We’ve
got our evidence from people who were around in the 30s – the decade when Jesus
died, and we have that direct in first hand eyewitness testimony from Paul. Historians
of all types are agreed that these really are Paul’s words, and that they
really were written so soon after Jesus. And we have it backed
up by writers who would have been hostile to Paul.

But what about the gospels? For a deeper look into what we
can know about Jesus, the next place to turn is the gospels. Only four extant
gospels are known to have been written in that first century. We have them all:
Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. I’ll be saying a bit about Mark and Luke in
particular in a future blog or two.